On October 2, 1950, at the height of the American postwar celebration  an
era when being unhappy was an antisocial rather than a personal emotion  a
27-year-old Minnesota cartoonist named Charles M. Schulz introduced to the funny
papers a group of children who told one another the truth:

"I have deep feelings of depression," a round-faced kid named Charlie Brown
said to an imperious girl named Lucy in an early strip. "What can I do about it?"

"Snap out if it," advised Lucy.

This was something new in the newspaper comic strip. At mid-century the comics
were dominated by action and adventure, vaudeville and melodrama, slapstick
and gags. Schulz dared to use his own quirks  a lifelong sense of alienation,
insecurity and inferiority  to draw the real feelings of his life and time.
He brought a spare pen line, Jack Benny timing and a subtle sense of humor
to taboo themes such as faith, intolerance, depression, loneliness, cruelty and despair.
His characters were contemplative. They spoke with simplicity and force. They
made smart observations about literature, art, classical music, theology, medicine,
psychiatry, sports and the law.

They explained America the way Huckleberry Finn does: Americans believe in
friendship, in community, in fairness, but in the end, we are dominated by our
apartness, our individual isolation  an isolation that went very deep, both
in Schulz and in his characters.

A lifelong student of the American comic strip, Schulz knew the universal
power of varying a few basic themes. He said things clearly. He distilled human
emotion to its essence. In a few tiny lines  a circle, a dash, a loop, and
two black spots  he could tell anyone in the world what a character was
feeling. He was a master at portraying emotion, and took a simple approach to
character development, assigning to each figure in the strip one or two memorable
traits and problems, often highly comic, which he reprised whenever the character
reappeared.

Charlie Brown was something new in comics: a real person, with a real psyche
and real problems. The reader knew him, knew his fears, sympathized with his
sense of inferiority and alienation. When Charlie Brown first confessed, "I
don't feel the way I'm supposed to feel," he was speaking for people everywhere
in Eisenhower's America, especially for a generation of solemn, precociously
cynical college students, who "inhabited a shadow area within the culture,"
the writer Frank Conroy recalled. They were the last generation to grow up,
as Schulz had, without television, and they read Charlie Brown's utterances
as existential statements  comic strip koans about the human condition.

For the first time in panel cartoons, characters spoke, as novelist and semiotics
professor Umberto Eco noted, "in two different keys." The "Peanuts" characters
conversed in plain language and at the same time questioned the meaning of life
itself. "Peanuts" depicted genuine pain and loss but somehow, as the cartoonist
Art Spiegelman observed, "still kept everything warm and fuzzy." By fusing adult
ideas with a world of small children, Schulz reminded us that although childhood
wounds remain fresh, we have the power as adults to heal ourselves with humor.
If we can laugh at the daily struggles of a bunch of funny-looking kids and
in their worries recognize the adults we've become, we can free ourselves. This
alchemy was the magic in Schulz's work, the alloy that fused the Before and
After elements of his own life, and it remains the singular achievement of his
strip, the source of its universal power, without which "Peanuts" would have
come and gone in a flash.

It's hard to remember now, when Snoopy and Charlie Brown dominate the blimps
at golf tournaments instead of the comics in Sunday papers, that once upon a
time Schulz's strip was the fault-line of a cultural earthquake. Garry Trudeau,
creator of "Doonesbury," who came of age as a comic strip artist under Schulz's
influence, thought of it as "the first Beat strip." Edgy, unpredictable, ahead
of its time, "Peanuts" "vibrated with '50s alienation," Trudeau recalled. "Everything
about it was different."

The "Peanuts" gang was appealing but also strange. Were they children or adults?
Or some kind of hybrid? In their early years, the characters were volatile,
combustible. They were angry. "How I hate him!" was the very first punch line
in "Peanuts." Charlie Brown and his friends could be, as the cartoonist Al Capp
said, "mean little bastards, eager to hurt each other." In "Peanuts," there
was always the chance that the rage of one character would suddenly bowl over
another, literally spinning the victim backward and out of frame. Coming home
to relax, Charlie Brown sits down to a radio broadcast whose suave announcer
is saying, "And what, in all this world, is more delightful than the gay wonderful
laughter of little children?" Charlie Brown stands, sets his jaw, and kicks
the radio set clear out of the room. Here was a comic strip hero, who, unlike
his predecessors Li'l Abner, Dick Tracy, Joe Palooka or Beetle Bailey, could
take the restrained fury of the '50s and translate it into a harbinger of
'60s activism.

On the one hand, the action in "Peanuts" conveyed a very American sense that
things could be changed, or at least modified, by sudden violence. By getting
good and mad you could resolve things. But, at the same time, Charlie Brown
reminded people, as no other cartoon character had, of what it was to be vulnerable,
to be human.